![]() It may be set in a croft house, but it is not cottage-core. Through Sunset Song, Gibbon explores themes of sexuality, Scottish identity, and the deaths of rural communities.Īgainst the sentimentalism of Victorian fiction, Sunset Song is starkly realist. Events ensue that test her and the fictional village of Kinraddie: life, love, death, and change. Chris Guthrie is a teen farmgirl torn between her studies, individual ambitions, family loyalties, and love for the homestead. The plot is a (relatively simple) rural drama set in the Mearns leading up to WWI. Gibbon’s characterisation of his protagonist, Chris Guthrie, is so convincing that Helen Cruikshank refused to believe a man could have written her. I was delighted to find in Sunset Song a feminist POV-a profound “female consciousness”-unafraid to shy away from the harsh truths women face. ![]() ![]() Like Joyce, his work concerns “everyday folk” in meticulous detail, and like Woolf, he builds on “difference of value” (in the words of Glenda Norquay) regarding gender and sex. Gibbon pioneers a new and unique writing style, possibly the closest to oral storytelling I’ve read. I consider it Scotland’s best gift to modernism-that movement encompassing Hemingway, Joyce, and Woolf. And yet, Sunset Song remains the finest book I’ve read. In a literary world dominated by the Central Belt -McDermid, Trainspotting, Stevenson-our pop culture overlooks the art of northern Scotland. Gibbon’s Sunset Song is, as said on the cover, “ the Scottish masterpiece”. ![]()
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